Ebike Industry Updates

My good friend Laurence Clarkberg is the one who destroyed my life about a decade ago by selling me my first ebike. He decided to build an ebike that could take him and his wife Judy across the country in comfort and style so he built the Sun Pony. I love this build because it reminds me of what is possible if you ignore what everyone else is doing and think outside the box. Watching this ebike go down the road brings me so much joy it’s hard to describe. This build reminds me of seeing Amish time traveling back from the future. Ironically a lot of Amish communities have been embracing ebikes and solar panel\powerstations for charging which I have to admit I totally love.

One of the main thing that makes this build unique is that it has 3 different shark packs paired with different motors giving it triple redundancy. The two mid drives are TSDZ2 systems which work well with this trike because they actually allow you to pedal backwards which is necessary to activate the coaster brakes that come stock with this tricycle. The BBS02/BBSHD have a double clutch system which means when you pedal backwards only the pedals move and the chain does not move. The mid drive batteries are plugged in continuously to the solar panels which each have their own Genasun 52v lithium battery MPPT charge controller from Grin (max charging speed is 8 amps).

Here you can see the left mid drive and 2 sharkpacks

Originally the trike came with a large drum brake in the front wheel, but Laurence replaced it with a Grin All-Axle motor and a separate shark pack. This Direct Drive motor allows the trike to have regen braking to help recover energy that might otherwise be lost going down hills. Laurence did not like how weak the rear coaster brakes were so he custom welded a brake attachment point on the front steel forks. Also the Grin All-Axle motor comes with a large built-in torque arm so you don’t have to worry about the dropouts ripping out from all the torque on the front motor.

Here you can see the custom welded front disk brake with a huge rotor for better stopping power

I was slumming it on Twitter today when I came across the following post:

Say it isn’t so

I started to really think about this chart and started to think about if I agreed with his theory that adding an electric motor on a bike increased the overall load on the bike by 708%. Since most of my time in the last 8 years has been spent repairing destroyed high power ebikes (1000-4000 Watts) I have to actually take this chart into consideration and start thinking about whether throwing on a high power electric mid drive motor really is what has created all this extra time spent repairing ebikes.

When I think about the main issues I’ve had with high power ebikes vs bicycles it really breaks down into these categories (in order of seriousness):

I want to discuss each of these issues individually because they all deserve their own descriptions. This article will not discuss maintenance of motors and batteries, but these items also require a fair amount of maintenance on their own as well that is outside the scope of this article.

These past few months, I have been hearing a lot about the New Talaria Sting, and how it compared to the popular Sur-Ron Light Bee. So many people were impressed by it that I decided to look into whether or not there were any significant differences, and…I did find some important upgrades that I want to desribe here, so lets get to it.

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Who is Talaria?

I am always skeptical of any new “me too” company that seems to be copying a popular product, but after some digging, Talaria has been importing the Sting for over a year now. The Talaria name is Latin for “winged sandal” which is a reference to the Roman god Mercury, who could fly swiftly because of the magical wings on his sandals. “Talaria Power Tech Chongqing, LTD” does have an office in Hong Kong, but almost all of their operations are in Chongqing, which is located in the mountainous region of central China.

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Today we’re talking about something near and dear to our hearts: saving cold hard cash. Specifically, how the US Postal Service can save a ton of money by switching from 40 year old Grumman LLV death traps to e-bikes. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “The Postal Service is a government entity, they don’t care about saving money.” Well, you’d be surprised. You see, the Postal Service is actually a business and like any business, they want to cut costs wherever they can. And let me tell you, switching to e-bikes is a surefire way for them to do just that. Not only will they save money on fuel and maintenance, but they’ll also be doing their part in saving the environment. So, strap on your helmets and let’s dive in to how the Postal Service can save some green while going green.

One of several electric vehicles the USPS is testing for mail and package deliveries, I think this design might have a few too many wheels

Fuel and maintenance savings for ebikes compared to gas powered vehicles are insane

The Post Office is still using those gas-guzzling Grumman LLV’s to deliver the mail and those things are about as efficient as putting a drag chute on a submarine.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Those Grumman LLV’s have been delivering the mail for 4 decades, what’s the problem?” Well the problem is that they’re not just outdated, they’re costing the Postal Service a fortune in fuel and maintenance costs. But don’t just take my word for it, let’s do some math.

The Post Office has a fleet of thousands of Grumman LLV’s and each one gets around 12 miles per gallon. That means they’re spending about $0.33 per mile on gas. Now, let’s compare that to an e-bike. E-bikes have a cost per mile of less than 1 cent. That’s a saving of over $0.32 per mile. The USPS 208,000 vehicles drive more than 1.1 billion miles each year, using 114.3 million gallons of fuel. If you assume $3.50 a gallon for gas that means they burn through over $400,000,000 a year, if they could swap out even a small number of their mail delivery vehicles in urban areas with ebikes they could cut that number by up to 97% for the fuel savings alone.

I see announcements once in a while about some new EV thing, and when I google it, every EV news outlet just has a copy/paste of the same info over and over. I think this particular motorcycle is very newsworthy, and I decided to see if I could find out some of the details, and here is what I found…

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A review of Ducati history

The Italian company Ducati is famous for two things. Winning races with advanced tech, and…not making a profit selling road bikes to the public. So, lets start at the beginning.

They are based in the city of Bologna, in northern Italy. This was useful to them, because one of the things Bologna was famous for was their university. Believe it or not, the university was founded in 1088, so that was on the leading edge of every new engineering field. Just after the first world war, the Ducati family formed a small company to make radio components. Their electronics factory was eventually destroyed in WWII, and to survive after the war, they decided to buy small motor kits from “Cucciolo” [*Puppy] and attach them to bicycles, which were desperately needed, since many Europeans could not afford a car at the time.

Electric cars are getting most of the buzz these days, but as much as I like them (and I DO like them), I think for the next twenty years a plug-in hybrid has a LOT going for it, and I like the take this opportunity to explain why it’s not a bad idea. My son now has a Tesla Model-3, but before that he had a Chevy Volt for many years, and when I drove it a few times, I was really impressed.

Parallel Hybrid: The engine or the motor can each power the wheels directly as needed.

Series Hybrid: The engine only powers a generator, a battery powers a motor that drives the wheels.

Plug-In Hybrid: Its an electric car that has a smaller battery than normal so the price and the weight can be lower. Most trips are not long distance, but if you ever need to drive on a longer trip, the auxiliary engine/generator will keep the battery topped off.

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Energica was formed in 2014 by Giampiero Testoni, head engineer for CRP Racing, which had won several European championships in the popular 250cc motorcycle class (they are also involved in F1 car racing parts design and production). He was approached in 2009 by the organizers of the TTXGP zero-carbon race (held on the Isle of Man), to encourage them to participate and design an electric race-bike. For the TTXGP electric race series to be successful, they needed several different credible competitors, and CRP was identified as a team that had the resources and a standing in the racing community that made them a good fit.

One year later in 2010, the “eCRP 1.4” bike won the European electric championship, so…I guess they figured out that whole “electric racing” thing…

Testoni’s team was able to build a running prototype of a production model for sale to the public, in time for the 2011 EICMA show in Milan. Based on the overwhelming interest shown, he forged ahead with plans for a series of production motorcycle models. They have their headquarters in Modena, right in the middle of the “motor valley”. This is also home to to Ferrari, Maserati, and Lamborghini…along with dozens of smaller custom design and manufacturing companies that serve the sports vehicle industry.

On the left is Livia Cevolini, a mechanical engineer and CEO of Energica. On the right is Giampiero Testoni, mechanical engineer, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Energica. And yes, they both ride…

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I’ve always loved vintage conversions to electric power. Dan is located in Kansas, and one day he showed his wife some pictures of motorcycles to see what kind she likes, and they settled on a vintage Honda from this era. It didn’t take long for him to find one in decent shape with a seized engine for only $500. I’ve also heard of builders buying an example that was running, and then selling the engine and transmission to someone who is restoring one, for near the cost of the entire purchase.

This particular model is a 160cc “Baby Dream” (made between 1966-69), and Dan has decided to call it the Dream-E.

In the pic above, Dan has stripped the frame down quite a bit (you can see the front wheel on the floor in the background). I love the style of the classic “toaster” gas tank, which Dan made sure to keep. You can also see how Honda made the frame out of two halves of pressed sheet-metal, rather than the common welded cylindrical tubes. Doing it this way can be lighter and more affordable to produce. If you ever want to search for something similar, make absolutely certain that the frame is not damaged by deep rust. However, mild dents and paint are not a problem, as you will soon see below.

Another benefit of this style of frame is that the engine is a stressed member, so there is no downtube curving under the engine. Any battery box that might be mounted in this space will also have to “hang” from the top and rear, but there are no frame-members that will interfere with the size and shape of the battery box.

Now that Dan had the frame in-hand, he can take measurements on the swingarm spacing, and order the motor that he has selected.

There has been a lot of controversy about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and subsequent selling of $40 Billion dollars of Tesla (TSLA) stock to finance the deal and keep Twitter solvent. There has been a lot of takes on this situation, but the one thing that no one seems to be talking about, especially the liberals is how this represents one of the largest wealth tranfers from the richest person in the world mostly into the hands of retail stock investors. Institutional investors tend to shy away from TSLA (only 43.5% of the stock is held by institutions). For long Tesla retail investors this is a once in a lifetime buying opportunity.

Elon sold another 3$ Billion dollars worth of stock between 12/12 and 12/14

Over the past 5 years I have spent $85,000 on solar panels, installed 7 heat pumps, put in another 12Kw of off grid solar panels on my wife’s house and purchased an electric Bolt for 1/2 price new. At this point I can say that I have personally kicked the fossil fuel addiction although the total cost to do so was a lot. I was looking for other ways to invest my money into moving humanity towards a sustainable future this year and decided investing in Tesla was a good choice. Since I have made that investment my stocks have dropped over 46% to date. When that happened I doubled down and at the same time as struggling to pay off my margin calls (don’t ever trade on margin) I moved all my retirement funds in both my Traditional IRA and Roth IRA from mutual funds to TSLA stock. One of the things that has really bothered me about investing in mutual funds is most of the index and mid cap funds invest in a lot of businesses that are contributing massively to global warming and trying to block progress with sustainable energy. I learned a valuable lesson that I should never trade on margin with TSLA stock dropping 46%, but instead of being upset about the dropping stock price I just doubled my investment in TSLA. I plan on investing over a 10-20 year period so it doesn’t matter that much if I bought the stock at $300 or $156. This is not investing advice, it’s just what I’ve personally done.

Some of my liberal friends are extremely toxic when it comes to Musk. I ask them to point to a single person who is alive who has done more to move humanity to sustainable energy than he has, I have never heard a good response to that. For all of his faults, what he has accomplished is astounding and I’m sure that no matter how much of his stock he sells off, he will be able to make it back in the future. The thing that amazes me is that no one is really talking about what an act of philanthropy it is for him to be selling off his stock in large chunks when the price is so low, thus driving the price even lower for retail investors. Warren Buffet said once that you can think of buying opportunities like this as a punch card you get for your life where there is only a small number of punches you get and you have to recognize when one of these opportunities present itself.

For politicians that constantly deride the capitalist system for the way massive amounts of wealth accumulate with a few individuals they should be rejoicing that the wealth from Elon Musk is very rapidly transferring from over to retail TSLA investors. Hallelujah.

2 weeks ago I had an incident with my hot water heater where it starting melting the plastic connectors and insulation and filling the house with smoke. There was a dedicated 750 Watt DC waterheating element with a built in thermostat that we had been using for about 6 months with our off grid solar system without too many issues. When I took the unit apart I could see of the 4 connectors 2 of them were soldered and had no issues, and 2 of them were just friction fit blade connectors both of which had built up resistance over time and pretty much self destructed. This event made me think it would be prudent to write an article about soldering vs using crimping or using connectors for your ebike build.

Laurence and Doug and our infamous art ebike

My friends Doug and Laurence built a giant Mutant Vehicle for Burning Man that was powered by 2 different 3000W cyclone motors. I built the system so that both motors were redundant and each powered one of the rear wheels. At the last Burning Man festival ‘Sparky’ the unicorn came back with both motors non-functional. Since the Playa dust is conductive and also destroys all electric connections I ended up just soldering the controller to the motor since the Anderson connectors had melted. Being out in the middle of the desert with a 1000lb art car that you have to push miles back to your camp is no fun so by soldering the motor to the controller I can prevent that connector from ever failing. I also wrapped all the connectors in a plastic ziplock bag and then use packing tape to seal it with zip ties at either end. Not pretty but it keeps out the dust and the rain.

Soldering

I’ve been a big fan of soldering for a while. I’ve found that for the most part soldering works well and is more resistant to the problems you have with crimping and using connectors. The exception to this rule was my electric tractor that ran at about 10,000+ Watts continuously. I took some lugs and filled them with Solder and then heated them up with a propane torch and submerged very thick multi-stranded welding wire into them. On some of the connectors it got so hot that the solder melted and poured out causing extreme heat and melting wire insulation. Other times what would happen is that the thin copper wires would self destruct right where it went into the lug connector and as more and more of the strands of the copper would break I ended up with runaway problems since the remaining strands would have to carry more current and then they would also fail. I would say for power levels greater than 5000W using crimped lugs is a smarter move.

When Soldering I have 3 different sized guns that I use depending on the size of the wire I’m trying to connect. I have a small 60 watt gun I rarely use and then a larger 200 watt and a monstrous 350 watt gun that works well on really thick wires. If you use a gun that is too small for the work you are trying to do then you will get frustrated. There are lots of great videos on Youtube about soldering so if you are new to it, practice as much as you can.

I thought I would save a few dollars on getting a 5kWh LifePo4 battery for my wife’s off grid home. Little did I know that this decision would cost me over a hundred hours of my time and take almost a year to get working properly. This article is a tale of my woes that stretched over the better part of a year and how I finally got the battery to work properly after replacing the BMS and one of the damaged cells. This story is not for the meek of heart so here we go.

This tiny dent (bottom right) in one of the 8 cells was enough to keep this cell from charging and discharging properly

It all started with Aliexpress

Aliexpress is owned by the same folks as Alibaba with the one big difference is that it looks a lot more like ebay and it is designed for people who just want to buy a couple of a particular thing instead of a couple of thousand of a particular thing. I got online and started shopping, I didn’t want the cheapest battery, but I also didn’t want the most expensive. I settled on a 24v 5kWh LifePO4 battery with a claimed charge/discharge rate of 250 amps. I have enough experience with chinese companies to know that a claimed charge/discharge rate of 250 amps really means a charge/discharge rate of 100 amps, but all I needed for our solar system was 80 so that was fine. The battery was about $1400 shipped so I paid the money with paypal and then the battery shipped. Because I bought this at the time of the shipping crisis it took well over 6 months to get here. I notified the sellers and they would send me a shipping manifest in chinese which I fed into google translate so I could follow my battery across the sea.

No pain, no working battery, all good things in life come through suffering

The battery arrives, but is smashed from shipping

I got the battery which showed 22v of voltage but would not charge or discharge. There was small plastic pieces in the box, there was no arrow showing what side was supposed to be up on the outside of the box and the 80lb battery had clearly been shipped upside down. They told me to take the battery apart to check the inside, but the top was glued on. There were handles on the top so I hung the battery from the handles and then heated up the glue around the rim of the box and used a screwdriver to open up the steel battery box and cutting my finger pretty badly in the process. Once the box was apart I could see what had happened. The battery was shipped upside down and one of the spot welded aluminum pieces on the first cell had broken off. That is why it was showing voltage (it was touching the battery) but why I could not charge or discharge because the connection was not good enough to pass any real amperage through.

This beautiful custom scooter really impressed me as soon as I saw it. As you can imagine, Steve is a experienced wooden boat builder, and he also makes fine furniture out of wood. If that wasn’t enough, Steve also owns patents for his development of the GoPed scooter “one arm” suspension. Steve made the wooden body, and the Vextrix chassis is owned by his close friend, Peter Senkowsky.

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Although Steve’s creation is based on a Vectrix VX-1 “scooter”, it is a serious commuter vehicle. As a road vehicle it is rated for 68-MPH. The front tire is a tubeless 120/70 on a 14-inch wheel. The Vectrix includes hydraulic disc brakes front and rear. Although the headquarters were in Massachusetts, the Vectrix was assembled in a factory located in Poland, since Europe has remained it’s biggest market.

The powertrain is a brushless electric motor attached to the left side of the rear wheel. A thin planetary reduction brings the motor’s high RPM’s down to wheel-speeds.

2006-2014

For the last 3 years I have really enjoyed riding my Ludicrous enabled Luna X-1 Full suspension ebike. After much use and abuse the rear freehub finally blew out. This is a common problem on higher power mid drive ebikes, but one that is easily remedied by relacing the rear wheel with a DT Swiss rear hub which uses a fantastic steel ratcheting system that is incredibly reliable. This article is about the issues I had when doing the rear wheel relacing and some direction on how to relace a rear wheel and also why I decided to swap the cassette, derailleur, shifter and chain from a 12 speed to a 10 speed chain.

This is the right hub for the X-1 : DT Swiss 350 Rear Hub – 12 x 148mm, 6-Bolt, HG 11 MTN, Black/White, 32H, 18pt for $239 on bikeman.com

The DT Swiss hubs can be hard to find and there is about a million different versions of them. I have bought about $1500 worth of DT Swiss hubs from bikeman.com and every single one has worked in the ebike I retrofitted them too. Generally I buy an ebike and run it till the freehub fails then I buy a DT Swiss hub and relace the wheel to get the bike back to ridable condition. Every single one of the high power mid drive fatbikes I ride including my Christini AWD are all fitted with the DT Swiss hubs at this point. Here is the cold hard truth, if you are running between 2000-4000 Watts through your drivetrain and plowing through deep snow your freehub will eventually self destruct. The lightweight and expensive aluminum ones will die faster but even cheap steel freehubs will eventually fail. The only hubs I have found that do not fail at those power levels is the DT Swiss ones with the Star Ratcheting system.

Measure spokes with this $10 tool

In all my DT Swiss conversions I have been able to use the same spokes that came with the original wheel. This makes things a lot easier and faster, just make sure that you keep the spokes on the different sides of the wheel separated because they are generally slightly different lengths. With the X-1 the spokes were extremely thick (12 Gauge?) and did not fit through the holes on the DT-Swiss hubs. I measured the length of the spokes with a spoke ruler and averaged the difference between the two sides and bought a set of 36 cheap spokes on Amazon that were 253mm for just $13.99 available here. Most wheels in the US only have 32 spokes so that leaves me with 4 extra spokes for future breakage. This includes the nipples as well. 38 cents a spoke is quite a bit cheaper than my local bike shop, but if you don’t have a spoke wrench and don’t want to deal with Amazon, you can wander into your local bike shop with the spoke that you have and they will try to find something similar or cut it and thread it if they have to.